Name: Meet The Modern CFO
Uploaded: 2025-10-16
Duration: 18 min 57 s

Chief financial officers are taking on roles that go well beyond traditional financial oversight. Today’s CFOs not only manage financial performance but also lead strategic initiatives, including technology investments during times of uncertainty. In this panel session, Fortune 500 CFOs will share how they are navigating these expanding responsibilities and positioning their companies for long-term growth.

Meet The Modern CFO

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So the CFO role is evolving. That's what we hear. What does it mean to be a modern CFO? I'll start with you. Goodness, great question. Oh, that's really loud. OK, well, you're absolutely right. I think the role of the CFO has been evolving over time. We were talking backstage and I am in role at ServiceNow almost 6 years and then I was CFO before that at my last place for about 3, so almost 10 years in the CFO role, and it's definitely been evolving. I would say much more so today than ever before. It's a combination of strategic vision. Solid and disciplined execution every single day along with enterprise-wide leadership. I tell my teams every day that we have to perform and transform at the same time and finance and strategy now is inseparable. And so I was recently promoted also to president and CFO and I have I have global strategy and corp de under my remit as well. And so as financial oversight and strategic vision and direction come together, it's all housed in one place under my remit right now, which is really. Exciting because as you think about capital allocation, one of the biggest jobs of a CFO, you've got to be fueling growth and really creating conditions for growth for the future. And so I'm sure we'll be talking about AI and investments in AI at some point today. But to be the steward of the of the checkbook and making sure that we are allocating resources to the growth areas is more important. So having that combination of strategy along with the execution and financial stewardship has been super fun. I say I'm in my my dream job because it keeps evolving every single day. Gina, I couldn't agree more, and I think realistically and as we were speaking backstage, the closing of the books, the financial reporting, that's kind of an autopilot, right? And if you have good teams and they're doing that day to day. And what that allows us to do is really partner with the CEO with the leadership team to really run the company, and I was actually telling Gino's story backstage. Um, I'm, I've been in the role for 1 year and a half and prior to this I spent 7 years running businesses, running P&Ls at Prudential, and when this opportunity came up, I was really worried that I was leaving behind running a business. What I didn't realize, but I quickly realized when I took on the role is that now I get to partner in running the entire company, and that's what makes the job so fantastic. I think the partnering piece is a huge aspect and talk about whether you talked about growth and I think about my role as being kind of the the internal growth partner to the entire executive team to really help them. Unleash the the capabilities they have within their team to really push to higher goals and also to help them understand what are the appropriate guard rails that we should have so that we can move as quickly as possible while achieving those goals. Yeah, now I just also add that. The role of the CFO has a really unique vantage point that we we are probably alone with the CEO and the ability to see across the entirety of the enterprise, so that ability to connect dots in what's working, what's not working, how to funnel investment in the right place, how to pause it when maybe it's not working as well, I think it gives us a unique perspective that I think is being valued more and more today. So you are basically sitting at the center of strategy at your that's right. And speaking of strategy, we're in times of uncertainty, um, how do you approach leading strategic initiatives like technology investments or M&A during uncertain times? Oh, you want to start, um, when I think about uncertain times, I think, you know, every time we're in a different moment we say, oh it's so uncertain now, but we look past the last couple of years and like we've had a lot of moments and uncertainty and so as I think about my role, I don't focus on what's uncertain today. Instead I focus on what is certain about our strategy. What do we need to accomplish today? What do we need to accomplish tomorrow? and how do I set up a balanced portfolio investment so that we can hit our goals across a varied um duration of of time horizons, not necessarily just focusing on the moment. I think when we focus on the moment we often miss the strategy that we're trying to um deliver over a multi-year period. How you know? I would say that um. The worst thing that you can do during periods of uncertainty is to freeze and to stop investing. It can be really easy to um go internal and really. Focus and and and kind of freeze investments and I'd say you've got to really understand the growth drivers and you gotta trim where you need to but always think about. Innovation for the future and making sure that you're still investing behind that innovation because uncertainty is just a bound. The life that we live now since 2020, it's, it continues to be uncertain. We've talked about it all day today like there's just periods and things going on that. We've got to be able to think about what's going to be right for the company, not just in a year, but 57, 10 years down the road, and how do we make sure that we're really investing for the future despite the uncertainty and I think that's where the alignment between strategy and finance really works so beautifully. Yeah, no, I think, um, I completely agree and I think it's a balance, right? You have to understand your organization's sensitivities. You have to understand the different scenarios and plan for those, but also you can't just live for today. You have to really invest in the future and balance the resources, the capital allocation so critical, right? What do I need to fund today, but how am I ensuring that I'm growing in the. Future and what do I need to stop doing because not everything you start works out and that there's a constant we you know we have a very thorough initiative review that we do on an annual basis and there are sometimes really difficult decisions you have to make about OK this is not working, we have to stop and there are other priorities that we should be investing in and that's the rigor that we go through on an annual basis. I think so. I'm just gonna add one thing because I think AI can really help because the ability now to have AI really driving cost savings and efficiencies and the ability to take those resources and reinvest elsewhere. I think it's gonna be super powerful and you know there's been a lot of commentary about is the AI cycle real or hype and ROI is slow to come. What I can tell you is that internally at ServiceNow we're using AI in everything. We do. We've actually been able to realize over $350 million of savings that is driven by AI productivity gains. Now we've we've reinvested a good chunk of that $350 million back into the business. But also allowed about 100 million to fall to the bottom line this year alone. So AI is real and it's not just hype, um, and it's durable if you're using it right. And so I think that enables us to think differently about investing for the future if we're able to. You harness AI and really drive that productivity internally. I think it's I think when when you're talking to the CFO about AI, I think there's a nervousness around the CFO is just looking for efficiencies like what does, what does this mean for me? Is this just a cost saving effort and When I think about it, it's really about someone mentioned this this morning, capacity gains. So it's not necessarily, you know, hopefully we can drop something in the bottom line, but even if we don't, how do we create more capacity in the organization so that we're faster, we're quicker, we're smarter, and we can do more? Well, I think you get the credibility by telling people I'm not going to take all of. That savings and bring it to the bottom line you can utilize it to hire more people to drive um this growth area that we know we need to invest in but the dollars were scarce beforehand. So if you're able to really lean in with the business and show them that it's not just about pulling dollars to to the bottom line but really investing for their future. You get a lot more credibility with the business, especially when it's driving growth and driving business, right? I mean for us our most success has come in delivering solutions to our customers. So in our group life uh benefits business we've cut out essentially all the blood testing, the medical exams using AI models to underwrite uh life insurance in our individual life business we've cut down underwriting from 22 days to seconds that allows. Is to grow the business efficiently and so that's what really spurs more investment and I think from the capacity perspective, especially in finance for example what I tell my team is we need to create capacity so we could actually do really value add work right strategic partnership to the business helping them make decisions, insights about how the business is performing that is what we should be doing versus manual work that we do now because that will all be done with AI. In that sense, do you think that with the use of AI in some sense you are redefining the finance function in terms of the talent that you may need for the future? We're actually in the process of thinking through that right now, so we've been going through, and you and I have talked about this, Cheryl, the finance transformation that we're on a journey for about 3 years, and what we are doing now is we are redefining our processes, so the closed process. The forecast process with an eye towards and where do we insert agentic AI in the new process so not taking the old process but redesigning the process and at the same time on a parallel basis we took a step back over a year ago and we said, what are the skills of the future that we will need because we will need different skills critical thinking, really strong analytical skills, business acumen. Uh, which if somebody's booking things on a manual basis they don't need those skills today and that's something that we've been infusing through the organization at the same time so that when the processes are there we can hit the ground running. I would say we're taking a similar approach and I think the impetus on us as leaders is to make sure there's an excitement and an engagement around what this can unlock for our employees in terms of, frankly, higher impact work than they've been doing historically so they get excited they can get engaged and they can build their skill sets as they help the company. And um my hopefully she's in the audience but my one of my peers my chief people officer is now our chief people and AI enablement officer because yeah because it's so important to to ensure that the entirety of the workforce is enabled with the new technologies um and we're 27,000 employees but we have 3. Million learners who need to understand the ServiceNow platform whether they're customers or partners helping to implement as well as our own employees and how do we make sure that they are getting the skills of the future for finance specifically it will change and it will morph how do we make sure that we are not just spending so much time gathering data. manually inputting, finding the data, cleaning the data and just AI spits it out so that you are really spending time analyzing the data, working with the business, helping drive decision making. That's a very different skill set. I think a really interesting skill set and where most people enjoy spending their time. Want to ask you, Gina, since we're in DC, uh, federal agencies are having an increased demand in AI driven efficiency. So how is Service now positioning itself to take, um, part in the evolving government contract plans. So our federal business is actually one of the strongest businesses in our portfolio, and the reason for that is because the Service now platform drives exactly what this administration is looking for. Accountability, efficiency, and modernization at scale and so our business has more our federal business has more opportunity today than ever before. We're actually seeing some of the government agencies drive over 30% productivity using the ServiceNow AI platform and so we just recently announced a partnership with OneGov um with the GSA and that's about how do we. Allow these incredible agencies to scale more broadly and to transact more efficiently and effectively, and that's been going over really well. So excited to be here in in in DC, but the reason for it is because the the scalability of the platform and the and the ability for that platform to really drive incredible efficiency and cost savings, which is exactly what the administration is looking for. I want to go back to strategic partnerships. Um, Ellie, uh, Brian Chesky is Airbnb CEO, but he's also the co-founder of the company. Um, how's the dynamic shaped your approach, um, when working with the CEO who is a co-founder? Yes, some of you may have heard a lot about Founder mode a year ago, and if you'd like to talk about that separately, we'll have a whole session. Um, what, what I say about the relationship with the CEO and the CFO, I think every CFO role is somewhat defined by the type of CEO that you have, and in my case I not only have a founder as a CEO but also a designer, and I would say that creates, you know, some interesting opportunities and challenges. He went to design school. I went to business school, and it's caused me to really evolve my processes, you know, I, you know, kind of by profession and inclined towards. Thinking about the numbers, thinking about the size of the opportunity and working with the founder and the designer has really opened my aperture to think about how do we do enough ideation up front, how do we not self-edit ourselves to really, you know, slow down our creativity, but how do we open up the aperture up front, be as creative as we can, and through that process figure out, you know, from the vantage point of the CFO, how do we create baby steps to create a vision as coming from the CEO. It sounds like a really cool balance between a finance and I bet I bet it could be challenging at times too, but that relationship between CFO and CEO is so critical and so important, out of my curiosity, Ellie, what is your favorite Airbnb location that you. This is like the last panel. I mean it's like choosing among your children. I've stayed in a million great Airbnbs as we were chatting earlier, the most recent fantastic Airbnb I stayed in, I was in New Year's Eve. I was in Sydney and we drove to the Southern Highlands outside of Sydney and I stayed in this Gothic Georgian manor that had been recreated by the owner. And he provided the most unbelievable hospitality and what was effectively a museum with with appropriately curated items and the special thing about this hospitality was that it was clearly not a child friendly home, and I had my three small children with me and he paused upon accepting my request to book and he read all of my reviews to make sure that his lovely home would be served with my children and he accepted me. It was an amazing experience. Well, in, in our final minutes, uh, as we're at MPW, I wanted to ask each of you kind of if you can give us advice or or something of what shaped your career journey, your leadership journey, something that is poignant that you always reflect on. Yeah, so let me start. So I've, um, I've had the privilege of working at Prudential for 28 years. So essentially my entire career I've had many different jobs in finance in the business, but for me what's always been the driving force and what's energized me is the ability to have an impact. An impact on our customers, on our employees, on our company as a whole, and uh that's what gets me up at night and during the day impact and then understanding that we have a clear purpose to make life better by solving the financial challenges of our changing world, and those two things make it really exciting to come to work. Thank you. For me, I would say that curiosity and calculated risk taking have been Um, a very clear pathway through my entire journey. Um, you know, I moved, I, my whole career was in New York and I moved back in 2013 for a job in Southern California. My husband's English, whole family is in London, my whole family is in New York, and we moved with a 5 year old and a 2-year-old and a traveling spouse to California, we had no support. And I would say that was just one of many risks I took, and I took it for um You know, a deputy CFO role, a really big company, um, but it's also the curiosity piece, so I tend to switch industries or when I start to feel like I'm getting too comfortable is when I tend to make a change and And take a risk and so that ability to continue to learn and to really help coach others to think differently about their careers has been something that has been super fun for me to um to to mentor and I've got a few of my mentees that are now CFOs and I take such pride in that. I really think that the next generation of leadership has got to be not necessarily so deep, but really have a breath of learning experiences and be open to learning more and then have the ability to inspire others to continue to grow as well. Thank you, Gina and Ellie, really quick to round this out, I've been very lucky. To, you know, spend my career in in high growth scaling companies, but I think about the most important moments in my career were actually during crisis. So both many years ago at Netflix when we, we split the DVD and streaming businesses and lost 80% of market cap in 3 months, and more recently with Airbnb when the pandemic hit and the business effectively imploded. I bring those two moments up because they've been the most instrumental in my career in terms of understanding what does leadership look like in moments of crisis when you have a huge amount of uncertainty and you need to move forward. I think I've learned more from those moments of crisis than than frankly some of the successes. This is a great discussion. Thank you so much thank you Cheryl thank you.